Two years after University administrators and state actors destroyed the Gaza Solidarity Encampments, expelled and deported students, and smeared anyone protesting against the genocidal Zionist state and in support of a liberated Palestine, the student movement is developing new tactics. One of these tactics involves challenging, exposing, and removing Hillel from our campuses. The New School, where I was chair of the Student Senate, was the first example. It should not be the last.
In May 2026, the New School’s Student Senate sanctioned its chapter of Hillel, a Zionist organization that operates on 850 campuses worldwide, by designating them “Not in Good Standing,” suspending all funding and collaboration. Hillel is an explicitly Zionist organization that claims to provide “Jewish life” services to students but, as a matter of policy, excludes students and speakers who are not Zionist. The New School Senate agreed that Hillel had violated both the Senate and the New School’s own university policy, requiring all student groups to adhere to international law.
As Chair of the Senate, I led the vote that culminated an 18-month Senate investigation. Throughout the investigation, which was supported by New School Jewish Culture Club and Students for Justice in Palestine, as well as the Drop Hillel campaign, student representatives compiled a 35+ page report documenting Hillel’s direct and extensive material ties to Israel’s violations of international humanitarian law, war crimes, and illegal occupation of Palestine.
The genocide of the Palestinian people has required a coalition of non-state actors, including civil institutions, news and media outlets, non-profits, and even groups on university campuses.
One of these groups is Hillel.
The Drop Hillel Campaign – Why Hillel?
Across the United States, Hillel embeds Israeli soldiers on university campuses to promote Israeli propaganda, or hasbara, and counter “anti-Israel activism.” The organization conducts Zionist programming on campus, often featuring active duty soldiers from the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF), and has numerous programs where students go directly to IOF bases and volunteer for the Israeli army.
Hillel has surveilled and doxxed students, particularly of Palestinian or Arab descent. It is apart of the same Zionist ecosystem as doxxing organizations like “Canary Mission” which the Trump administration has used to identify and target pro-Palestinian academics and student protesters for deportation.
The Hillel at the New School is particularly egregious. As part of the Leder Family Hillel, which also includes Hillel at Baruch and seven other NYC campuses, Hillel at the New School, a registered student organization (RSO), offers a program titled “Hillel on Base” where students fly to Israel and directly volunteer for the Israeli military as they commit genocide, war crimes, mass starvation, and displacement.
The normalization of these trips to Israeli military bases reflects the inherent depravity of Zionism. There are students on college campuses who, during their summer and winter breaks, are providing direct material support for a military committing genocide, occupation, and apartheid.
Hillel defends these trips to military bases, calling them “normal Jewish ties to Israel.”
But, it is not normal to volunteer for a military committing a genocide. It is not normal to dress as a combatant by wearing Israeli military uniforms. It is not normal to prepare meals for Israeli soldiers who have committed massacres. And yet, this is exactly what Hillel at the New School and their affiliated students have chosen to do, and will continue to do, unless stopped.
As students and organizers, we must absolutely refuse to give even an inch to normalizing Zionist narratives and accusations of ‘antisemitism.’ Students across the United States must refuse this normalization, which builds the consensus needed to justify the massacre of the Palestinian people by the State of Israel and advance principled anti-Zionist struggles on our campuses.
Building the case against Hillel
Earlier this year, the New School Student Senate passed a bill requiring student organizations to be in compliance with international law. Additionally, we created an “RSO compliance committee” to monitor student groups’ adherence to international law and school policy. Given that Hillel was already widely known for its collaborations with the Israeli military during the genocide in Gaza, the senate’s RSO compliance committee formally placed Hillel “Under Review” and produced an extensive report detailing Hillel’s violation of international law.
On May 1, 2026, the Senate heard the committee’s findings. These findings included not only Hillel’s direct material complicity in genocide, but also that students were aiding and abetting through providing logistical support to the Israeli military. For example, the report extensively documented that Hillel students supported the Israeli military through both the “Hillel on Base” program and its Birthright “Onward Students” program. The report identified that students volunteered on two Israeli military bases and served four brigades, which have themselves been implicated in the violation of international law, including war crimes.
In the report, we identified two bases associated with the Hillel on Base program. The Hatzerim airbase and the Tze’elim Army Base. The Hatzerim airbase stations F-15I and F-16I combat squadrons that have conducted hundreds of airstrikes on Gaza and Lebanon, resulting in the maiming, disabling, and murdering of thousands of families. The Tze’elim Army Base, nicknamed “Mini Gaza,” is an Israeli military training site used for occupation tactics deployed on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Nine months into the genocide in Gaza, Hillel on Base sent students from the New School to volunteer on these two bases, where they aided over 700 soldiers from four different units: the Golani Brigade, Handasa Corps, Kfir Brigade, and Oketz Unit.
In March of 2025, the Golani brigades massacred 15 paramedics in Gaza and buried them in mass graves along with their ambulances to cover up their war crime. Mohammad Bhar, a man with Down syndrome, was mauled to death by an Oketz military dog in his family home. Omar Assad, 78, a Palestinian-American grandfather, was zip-tied, blindfolded, and left to die of a state-induced heart attack in the cold by the Kfir Brigades. The 92nd Battalion of the Kfir Brigade abducted two elderly Palestinian men, Ali Marouf and Nadi Marouf from Beit Lahia, forced them to strip and used them as human shields before killing them. The Handansa Corps has systematically destroyed Gaza’s universities, hospitals, and homes. These are only some of the violations of international humanitarian law and war crimes these groups have committed. Hillel directly aided, abetted, and provided support to all four brigades.
For these reasons, Hillel at the New School is in direct violation of international law and should be sanctioned and held accountable.
It is not the fault of Palestinians that Judaism is articulated through and expressed by Zionism, nor is it that the “center for Jewish life” on campuses is a part of a global architecture of genocide.
Administrative retaliation
Immediately following the vote, the administration retaliated against students involved with the Drop Hillel initiative. The university issued a Title IX notification to the Student Senate for its decision to adhere to international law. Additionally, Student Senate members experienced doxxing, threats, and a sweeping condemnation by Zionist media outlets and state actors, including NY Representatives Ritchie Torres and Dan Goldman, both of whom accused the students and the senate of “antisemitism.”
The day after the vote, the New School administration sent a community-wide email from President Joel Towers, Provost Richard Kessler, and Vice Provost Robert Mack to students, parents, and university affiliates, smearing the actions as a targeted act of antisemitism and anti-democratic deliberation. Hillel’s director, Adam Lehman, and the Anti Defamation League (ADL) president, Jonathan Greenblatt, both issued similar statements. Ilya Bratman, an executive director of Hillel, sent an email to the New Schools President demanding a meeting to ensure the administration continues to repress the democratic decision.
There has not been such a wide-sweeping campaign of condemnation since the 2024 Gaza Solidarity Encampments.
A blueprint for students everywhere
This fearmongering was also reflected by Zionist media outlets, including the Times of Israel, which warned that this is a new tactic and has been described elsewhere as a “new front in anti-Israel campus activity”. “The New School is just the beginning. It’s a precedent that’s set for a bunch of campuses,” said the campus director of Hillel, and forewarned that “student governments elsewhere will prosecute their Hillels using the same blueprint.”
As students, we have the power to demand that no group on our campus should have direct material ties to war crimes, let alone be participating in the genocide perpetuated by the Israeli military against the Palestinian people.
This is where the Drop Hillel campaign and Hillel agree: the goal was to build a blueprint, and we are already seeing our movement spread.
A plurality of tactics is required to dismantle Zionism. The campaign at the New School reaffirms that, as students, we have the power to demand that no group on our campus should have direct material ties to war crimes, let alone be participating in the genocide perpetuated by the Israeli military against the Palestinian people. As students, we understand that international law will never alone liberate Palestine, as has been well documented. However, the vote at the New School shows that wielding it as an instrument can lead to success.
This tactic also heightens the contradictions and asymmetries of both the university policy and international law. Right now, students are holding their institutions accountable to their own promises and policies by presenting a case in line with their own guidelines. The repression that has ensued speaks both to the hypocrisy of these institutions and their institutionalized anti-Palestinian racism. However, this repression also reveals a shifting world order, where overt dominance, violence, and force are no longer veiled in the discourse of legality.
Zionists and their administrative colleagues will be increasingly placed on the defensive and forced to address our questions. Why is there a student organization on our campus that has direct ties to genocide? Why is serving a foreign military only acceptable when it is the Israeli military? These are questions we must demand answers to, and which the New School administration, and President Joel Towers refuse to answer.
One goal of the campaign at the New School was to act as a catalyst and open a new front for the student movement in the struggle against the Zionist State, in accordance with Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), and Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). Students should advocate for, or themselves propose, legislation affirming the necessity of compliance with international law at their universities.
Nothing short of a total boycott, sanctioning and ostracization of all Zionist institutions complicit in the colonization, bombing and genocide of Palestine—and the expansion of the Zionist project into Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, Syria—is acceptable.
The stigma has now been broken. No longer will students allow Zionist organizations – such as Hillel – to mask their racism and support for genocide in the language of religious right. To all other students at universities, let this quote, written in a private email that I obtained from the executive director of a New York City Hillel chapter to the president of the New School, be used as a call for mobilization: “Our greatest concern is that this action sets a dangerous precedent – not only for The New School, but for colleges across America.”
Let’s make it so.
Ryder Glickman
Ryder Glickman is a 4th year Economics student at the New School for Social Research studying the Political Economy of Palestine, international trade, critical minerals, and the economics of imperialism. As a member of SJP, he served as Chair of the New School Student Senate, implementing students’ demands for BDS, PACBI and divestment. He remains committed to organizing for Palestine, and for the liberation of people everywhere.
